1.
Born on a train, his first breath pulled
out of the depths of the ancient lake where Christ
came and declared that beyond it there was nothing.
Born with the smell of ice coming off its sweeps
too early for Spring, some old spirit of the deep
entered him, the fluidity of a fish come into his spine,
blown on the Barguzin that first night and day,
sunshine found him and a restless soul.
2.
In the photograph he carries with him he is a small child
sitting on his own knee – the grown one in drag as if to dance
the nurse in some forgotten ballet. He is beautiful
and sun-tanned from the fields in printed summer cottons
without the scar on his upper lip – his mother’s face
that he would forget if it was not his own.
In the heady years he will sometimes find a time
to phone and be transported to their small room.
He can conjure then the smell of a Russian summer
or the sour sweat of his father’s work clothes
and his sweet tobacco. He wonders if his father was still
a dreaming boy, kneeling to pray in the madrassa,
would he take his call and speak to him
without anger across the acres of time.
When he visits his mother once in the new times
she is an empty room with only an oil lamp
and an old kilim and he thinks of those
he collects in his Paris apartment
and wishes he could show all this to her
that would seem the wealth of a Czar.
3.
When Avedon asks him to dance and captures him,
he stays at the end of the shoot to ask
if he would be photographed dancing naked.
He has done this once before as a boy, danced
unhindered by his clothes, feeling divine in a field
where the corn shielded him and where each step
left a trampled damage. He sees a look in the
photographer’s eyes that will become a look he knows.
He says yes.
4.
He flies over the Canadian wilderness to the hospital
where Eric is dying. Each has tried to be the other’s life
and it has not worked. Entering the room, he remembers
Eric’s story of once, as a little boy in Denmark, going out
of himself as he sat ensconced in an apple tree – heard
his mother’s call for dinner and saw himself –
a little boy sitting in an apple tree, his mother calling.
Now he must climb up onto the surgical bed
as if they are both children, as if this was their first
ever dance, the holds to be worked out so carefully
since held wrongly he will fall. Now it is a case
of finding places to hold, to move their limbs
among the tubes and in ways that will not hurt him.
Now there is no more movement, only the hold.
Rudik, who was so rough with him in their lovemaking,
is now the gentle one, now the one
who holds him from behind realising how light
he would be to carry and there are no more words.
~
He will hear of the death on his island.
Sitting on a balcony with a friend,
bathed in the smell of night jasmine
he will say, ‘ Eric died today’.
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